USC School of Pharmacy Dean R. Pete Vanderveen announced the appointment of Wei-Chiang Shen to the John A. Biles Professorship in Pharmaceutical Sciences.

“I am pleased to make this appointment recognizing Dr. Shen’s outstanding contributions to the School of Pharmacy and to his research in drug delivery,” Vanderveen said.

Shen’s accolades include the Eurand Award Grand Prize for Outstanding Novel Research in Oral Drug Delivery in 2002.

While Shen has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards throughout his career, he was especially pleased to receive this appointment. “Twenty years ago I was recruited to the USC School of Pharmacy by then Dean John A. Biles,” he said. “To now be appointed to the chair named for Dean Biles, an inspiration to me, is a great honor.”

Shen’s career has focused on novel ways of delivering drugs, particularly large-molecule drugs, to targets in the body. As many of today’s most promising drugs are large-molecule proteins, this area of research has become of great importance in the last decade.

“Proteomics and genomics have helped us identify the ideal targets in a cell. New drugs have been developed that offer tremendous therapeutic value,” said Shen, who joined the USC faculty in 1987. “But none of this means a thing if we are not able to carry the medicine to the right place in the body while still maintaining the drug’s integrity and ability to do its job. It’s my job to make the delivery happen.”

As one of the pioneering investigators in this area of study, Shen has primarily explored oral and pulmonary delivery routes. His work recognizes the limitations of injectable delivery, ranging from cost to poor compliance to side effects. In the past, researchers believed that protein drugs could not be orally delivered, citing poor permeability and a harsh environment as primary reasons.

When scientists identified transferring – the carrier protein for iron in blood – as an excellent transporter of drugs to their intended cells for therapeutic effect, new research avenues were opened. Shen’s work in this area includes a project that strives to create a novel class of fusion proteins that combine transferrin with a protein drug such as human granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF).

“The goal is to provide G-CSF patients, including cancer patients that use the drug to boost immune function, with a way to take their medicine orally instead of having to regularly inject themselves,” he said.

Shen’s research in this area is supported by a National Institutes of Health grant and by a contract from Pfizer. Shen also is working on other grants addressing different issues in protein drug delivery.

“Our research, along with other scientists around the world, strives to more efficiently deliver medicines to targets in the body with greater ease for patients. This presents a very exciting future,” Shen said.

He has published more than 100 articles, holds 12 U.S. patents and is a fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences.